Jonathan Zimmerman: Amish Preserve Simpler Times

Strange.

Those are the types of adjectives we’ve been hearing about the Amish, ever since last week’s horrible school shootings at the one-room West Nickel Mines School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And surely, they do look strange to most of us. With their hats and their bonnets, their horse-drawn buggies and their “Dutch” dialect, they sometimes seem like creatures from another country, or from another world.

But in at least one respect, the Amish embody a deeply American tradition: the one-room schoolhouse itself. For most of our history, Americans studied in buildings that strongly resembled the West Nickel Mines School. Ranging in age from 4 to 20, pupils learned from each other and from a lone teacher; she was usually young and female, just like the West Nickel instructor. In the warm months, children frolicked in the fields outside the school; in the winter, they huddled around its pot-bellied stove. They recited lessons, sang hymns, and stood up and down for spelling bees.

In other words, they behaved a whole lot like those strange Amish. As late as 1917, when the United States entered World War One, 70 percent of all of its public schools employed just one teacher. Nearly 200,000 one-teacher schools dotted the American landscape, enlisting five million children—or one quarter of the total public school population.

All of this began to change in the 1920s, when school consolidation became the educational craze du jour. Denouncing the inefficiency and provincialism of the one-room schoolhouse, officials built so-called “central” schools that drew from wider geographic areas—and offered more courses and services.

Slowly but surely, the one-room schoolhouse began to disappear. Between 1917 and 1947, single-teacher schools closed at an average of 4,000 per year. That still left about 75,000 one-room schools at the end of World War Two, serving 1.5 million students.

Almost all of these buildings would shut their doors in the 1950s and 1960s, when the postwar baby boom sparked a new round of central-school construction. By 1995, just 428 public one-room schoolhouses remained in operation in the United States.

Rural Americans denounced these changes, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. They petitioned educational officials, lobbied legislators, and staged protests in defense of “The Little Red Schoolhouse.” Eventually, though, they came to accept—if not to applaud—the demise of one-room schools.

But not the Amish. Instead, they established their own. Contrary to what you might guess, the Amish were early and avid allies of public education. They sat on school boards, voted in school elections, and packed their kids off to one-room schoolhouses. As these local schools began to close, however, the Amish refused to patronize “consolidated” ones. The new schools were too far away, requiring the Amish children to board buses; they employed non-Amish teachers, whom nobody knew; they taught newfangled subjects, including sex education and gym. And they didn’t let you pray.

So the Amish started building their own schools, like the one in West Nickel Mines. The Amish now operate more than 1,200 schools around the country, most of which employ just one teacher; that’s about three times the total number of one-teacher public schools. Even while Americans have turned away from their one-room tradition, in short, the Amish—and the Amish alone—have kept it alive.

That’s not to say that our old one-room schools were always such great shakes, educationally speaking. Younger students nodded off to sleep next to the stove, falling backwards off their benches; older pupils harassed the teacher, who frequently knew little more than they did. Despite the romantic image of the “Little Red Schoolhouse,” meanwhile, the buildings themselves were often unpainted shacks.

But they were ours. Children could walk to school, unattended, because they knew everyone they encountered along the way; parents visited for dramatic productions and Christmas pageants, bringing sweets and other gifts for the teacher; and the teachers all came from the area, or boarded with someone who did. However dusty and dilapidated, the school was a social and symbolic center for the entire community.

Maybe that’s why so many of us were so deeply affected by the tragedy at the West Nickel Mines Amish School. Strange as they might look to contemporary Americans, the Amish also remind us of a rich educational heritage that we once shared. As we grieve for their loss, we remember our own.